Friday, May 20, 2016

intertidal exploration

Went exploring this morning and got to see the different zones of the intertidal. First creature I stumbled upon was a sea star of the Echinoderm phylum. Cool thing about them, is how they invert their digestive system and slowly break down whatever nutrients they need. We also found a couple crabs of the Arthropoda phylum, which did not seem to take kindly to us. Very agitated and defensive. We were able to distinguish between the male and female by the width of their underlying tails'. Overall it was a pretty amazing morning, as we saw lots of creatures from different phylum, however we did not find a octopus, so I will be keeping an eye out.